Lao She and Lao Xiang
Lao She and Lao Xiang were pivotal figures in the popular culture drive, for they put ideas into practice. As the president of the ACRAWA, Lao She played a particularly crucial role in promoting popular literature. As a widely acclaimed writer in his own right, he lent the art a much-needed sense of legitimacy and mapped out a strategy for its dissemination. Lao She's nonpartisan stand and his unassuming character not only earned him wide respect among his peers, but it also seemed to underscore the sincerity of the work he was sponsoring.
Born in Beijing and of Manchu origin, Lao She first burst onto the literary scene in the mid-1920s with his novels The Philosophy of Old Zhang (Lao Zhang de zhexue) and Zhao Ziyue. Like his contemporary Shen Congwen (1903–1988), Lao She was noted for championing simple values and human integrity in his works. But unlike Shen, who focused especially on soldiers, peasants, and remote rural life, Lao She's characters are mostly urbanites caught in a world of corruption and deceit.[20] Lao She felt strong sympathy for the underprivileged. Nowhere was this more evident than in his treatment of the tragic hero Camel Xiangzi, the protagonist and title character of his masterpiece written on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War. Xiangzi is a kind hearted, indefatigable country lad who is determined to eke out a living in Beijing by sheer hard work. But his repeated attempts to own a rickshaw and live an independent life are thwarted by evil forces all around him: the unruly military, the atrocious secret police, and the ugly daughter of his rickshaw boss. In the end, this honest man is destroyed by a rapacious and depraved society. His fate seemed to point to the futility of individual effort and the need for concerted action, an idea that became a reality for Lao She as he joined the collective campaign against the Japanese when the war broke out.
Throughout the war years, Lao She continued to write novels. But none quite matched the brilliance and sophistication of his earlier works. Perhaps realizing spoken drama's potential to reach a wide audience, Lao She also tried his hand at writing plays, producing a number of them, including The Nation Above All (Guojia zhishang, coauthored with Song Zhidi) and The Problem of Face (Mianzi wenti). As a whole, however, the plays are mediocre at best, devoid of artistry and visual appeal and lacking originality and insight into character. "Because he is a novelist," drama critic Tian Qin remarked politely, "his plays seem to retain the wit of a novel"[21] —a shortcoming that Lao She frankly admitted later when he confessed that he did not understand the distinctions between writing scenes in a play and chapters in a novel.[22] Arguing that everything must serve the war cause, Lao She imbued his plays with a distinct patriotic fervor.[23]The Nation Above All, for example, tells the story of a stubborn Moslem who, realizing that China cannot win the war against Japan unless people join together with a single will, decides to put aside ethnic and religious differences and join hands with his fellow countrymen.[24] Yet what Lao She lacked in artistic refinement in his wartime novels and spoken dramas, he made up for by his robust promotion of popular literature.
Lao She left Ji'nan in Shangdong province for Hankou in late 1937. En route he was robbed several times, which were bitter and traumatic experiences.[25] Fortunately, he was able to find temporary solace at the home of Feng Yuxiang, the famous Christian general, whom he had known earlier when he was a lecturer at Qilu University in Ji'nan in the early 1930s. General Feng, a passionate man with an imposing presence, received Lao She with open arms and enthusiastically supported his work in popular culture. Despite Feng's colorful public image, he lived a simple life and participated in arduous maneuvers with his troops. Like other patriots, he was also extremely critical of the GMD government's conciliatory policy toward the Japanese, and so drew the ire of Jiang Jieshi. In his early years, Feng had used simple songs (many of them his own compositions) and plays to inspire his troops and teach them such virtues as bravery and patriotism, an unorthodox method in his day.[26] During the war, Feng promoted the resistance cause, inviting folk artists to join the movement and lecturing and writing voluminously on Japanese aggression; he was especially known for his simple, down-to-earth, nationalistic songs called qiuba shi (soldiers' poems).[27] More important, Feng was an enthusiastic champion of popular culture and a staunch supporter of the ACRA-
WA. He lent his prestige to the organization from the start, serving as a director and contributing money when it was badly needed.[28]
In Hankou, with the support of Feng and together with Lao Xiang and He Rong (1903–1990), Lao She helped to launch the magazine Resisting Till the End (Kang dao di), a bastion for popular literature in the early phase of the war.[29] When the ACRAWA was founded in March 1938 in Hankou, Lao She, widely respected by left and right alike, was elected its president. He vowed to turn the organization into "a new mechanized force,"[30] a martial phrase reminiscent of the language of wartime journalists. He remained in that post throughout the war years, helping to set the nation's cultural and literary agenda.
Lao She's mild and charming manner masked an iron will: he was resolute in pushing what he believed in. Like Gu Jiegang and Lao Xiang, he viewed popular culture as an ideal propaganda weapon. In his early career, he already demonstrated an enormous interest in a variety of traditional cultural forms. As a child growing up in the capital, Lao She had developed an enduring interest in the folk arts and local customs of old Beijing. He frequented the theaters and the teahouses, enjoying Beijing opera and listening to the storytelling and comic dialogues of local artists. The performing skills that he inadvertently picked up in these rather unconventional places later added a theatrical touch to his classroom lectures, earning him a reputation as a lively teacher in his Qilu University days.[31]
Lao She was never an iconoclast. Unlike his May Fourth contemporaries, who vehemently attacked Chinese tradition as fusty and backward, Lao She had strong feelings of nostalgia toward the past. What he cherished, however, was not the Confucian elite culture, but the old customs and manners that still thrived among ordinary people. "I was born in Beijing," Lao She once wrote, "and I know well its people, its events and scenery, its atmosphere, the cries of peddlers selling plum juice and almond tea. As soon as I close my eyes, the city appears before me like a vivid, richly colored painting. This gives me the courage to describe it."[32] Lao She's genuine love for popular culture in general and old Beijing in particular is evident in his works, which contain a wealth of information about lower-class people and their life in that ancient city. Many of his stories seem to conjure up an old, forgotten China brought back out of memory. He was particularly noted for his lively use of Beijing dialect (as in The Philosophy of Old Zhang).
Thus when Lao She came to promote popular culture during the war, he was already an expert in and great admirer of this art. To him,
popular cultural forms not only possessed superior intrinsic value, but they also embodied certain essential ingredients of China's rich cultural legacy. The war, instead of undermining his emotional and spiritual ties with the past, only strengthened his love for his country's multifaceted traditions. Echoing Xiong Foxi's notion of "education in entertainment," Lao She embraced popular culture as an educational tool. His childhood experience constantly reminded him that "inelegant" places like theaters and storytelling houses were as important as academic settings in providing the general public with knowledge of life's realities. "They were," he said, "tantamount to people's schools."[33]
To plead a convincing case for popular culture, Lao She realized that he had to dispel the myth that it was low and worthless. Like Lao Xiang and Gu Jiegang, he argued that popular culture forms were often moving and entertaining. "Their fresh and pure words resemble newly picked vegetables from the garden. Their vocabulary comes from the people, representing their thoughts and imagination. On this point alone, perhaps, popular culture contains more new blood than the classics and the new vernacular literature."[34]
Lao She's comment, which seemed to echo the views of such May Fourth folklorists as Liu Fu and Zhou Zuoren, was certainly romantic and exaggerated. To him, folk tradition was a pastoral landscape not yet trampled by the evils of urbanization and modernization, and popular culture forms were a potent source for cultural rejuvenation. Yet Lao She also gave the most detailed and convincing argument on why writing popular literature was such a difficult task for intellectuals, and in so doing he brought respect to the genre. Lao She believed that writers encountered three difficulties when composing such popular pieces: namely, the writing must be comprehensible, entertaining, and pleasing to the ear (yue'er) —a difficult task at best.[35] But before writers could begin to solve these riddles, they needed to ask an even more fundamental question: For whom was the writing intended? To Lao She, the answer was very clear: "We must aim at the common people."[36] In an influential article from 1938, "The Difficulty of Writing Popular Literature," Lao She offered the following advice:
First, forget that you are a man of letters. In other words, forget Shakespeare and Du Fu, and turn yourself into a country storyteller.
Second, discard highly specialized sociological and economic terms. If you can change descriptions such as modeng nüxing
[modern ladies] to xiao jiaoniang [young women], it would be even better.
Third, in portraying characters, black and white must be contrasted sharply. It must be simple and forceful.
Fourth, put your story into a familiar, easily recognizable setting.
And finally, use dialect.[37]
In suggesting dialects as a useful vehicle in writing popular literature, Lao She was raising a difficult question long debated by May Fourth intellectuals. The folklorist Liu Fu, for example, recognized the value of dialect literature as a genuine folk product coming from the illiterate peasantry, and the leftist writer Qu Qiubai valued dialects as essential components in his ideal "mass language."[38] Like Qu, Lao She criticized the new vernacular literature as being a kind of elitist writing focusing on "college professors, bank managers, dancing girls, and politicians" and thus separate from the life of real people. "Popular literature," Lao She wrote, "must use the language of the folk and write about the life of the people." Nevertheless, the dialect issue was a controversial one, for its full realization could lead to parochialism, which would contradict the original goal of fostering a national consciousness.
For Lao She, those who could best master "the language of the folk" were folk artists such as storytellers and drum singers. "They are the ones who live among the people, while we intellectuals are no doubt far removed from them," he lamented.[39] Lao She therefore heartily applauded General Feng Yuxiang's move to invite folk artists to join the resistance camp. In his view, that act was more than a proper recognition of an underrated art; it was a true confession on the part of intellectuals that they were inferior to folk artists when it came to using popular cultural forms as a resistance tool.
Since the majority of the people were illiterate, simplicity of content was essential to make popular literature influential, Lao She argued. Subtlety, sophistication, and finesse had no place in such works. He particularly advocated the use of rhymes to reach as wide an audience as possible, pointing out that popular literature was not just a written form of artistic expression, it was "oral persuasion" (koutou xuanchuan). "Beside paying special attention to the common vocabulary and their simple meanings, we must make sure that popular literature exudes beautiful melodies," he wrote.[40] His friend He Rong agreed: "Rhymes are the main ingredient of popular literature." Without a basic understanding of rhyme patterns and their implementation, a
writer could hardly claim that he had mastered the essence of popular literature.[41]
By stressing the importance of rhymes, Lao She showed his unique understanding of the nature of popular performing arts. He was in fact one of the few resistance intellectuals to note the actual performance effect of popular literature. His theatergoing experience made him realize that the composition of an audience and the conditions of performance were just as important as the work itself in deciding its success or failure. The effect of a piece of popular literature, in other words, came not from its latent possibility but from its realization.
The effectiveness of a piece of popular literature relied heavily on the circumstances under which it was performed, including the personalities involved. A seasoned performer such as the famous Beijing drum singer Liu Baoquan could easily bring the audience to its feet, but a less experienced performer might have just the opposite effect.[42] Since writing popular literature was by no means easy, and since most of the writers in this endeavor were amateurs, Lao She suggested that they study the folk singers and traditional storytellers for ideas and techniques. "Learn from experts [neihangren ]!"[43] Practicing what he preached, during the war Lao She cultivated a close friendship with a father-daughter Beijing drum singing team, the Potato (Shanyaodan, whose real name was Fu Shaofang) and Big Blossom (Fuguihua, whose real name was Fu Shu'ai), learning their techniques. He also sought advice from Bai Yunpeng, another acclaimed Beijing drum singer.[44] Lao She's sincere respect for folk artists and his repeated emphasis on the conditions of performance underscored his strong aversion to grandiose theorizing. The power of a piece of popular literature, he firmly believed, lay not in its text, but in its ability to communicate directly with the audience. This view reflected the general determination among resistance intellectuals to translate abstract issues into personal and concrete statements.
Lao She created works in a variety of areas during the war, including drum songs, comic dialogues, shulaibao (rhythmic storytelling to the accompaniment of clappers), and Henan zhuizi (ballad songs popular in Henan province). Some of them—three drum songs, four traditional operas, and one old-style novel—were published in his popular literature collection entitled San si yi (Three, Four, One, 1939). They were produced, Lao She wrote in the preface, according to the formula of "pouring new wine into old bottles."[45] Among a score of Lao She's drum songs, "Wang Xiao Drives a Donkey" ("Wang Xiao gan lü," 1938) is one of the best known. A short piece that touches
directly on the issues of patriotism and sacrifice, it describes how Wang Xiao, a peace-loving and hardworking young man who takes care of donkeys as a living, decides to join the army after China is invaded by the Japanese. Shocked by the brutality of the invaders, Wang Xiao resolves:
I shall go enlist in the army.
I am a man of indomitable spirit,
To die for my country I feel no regret,
It is better than living as a slave under the bayonets of the enemy.
After bidding farewell to his widowed, ailing mother, Wang Xiao sets off on his journey to the front:
As he turns around and looks at his home again,
He sees his mother standing stiffly at the doorstep.
Choosing between being a loyal citizen and a filial son is hard,
But [at last] he stamps his feet and leaves his hometown.[46]
"Wang Xiao Drives a Donkey" was certainly one of Lao She's better pieces.[47] Despite its predictable ending, the song nevertheless bursts with emotion, a general call to arms issued in a familiar folk art form. Other of his drum songs such as "The Second Phase of the War of Resistance" ("Erqi kangzhan," 1938) and "A Eulogy to the Wartime Capital" ("Peidu zan," 1942) exude similar confidence and fervent nationalism, attempting to instill a sense of optimism amid a climate of uncertainty and fear.
Lao She was concerned more with patriotic value than with artistic sophistication. This can be seen in his "Classic for Women" ("Nü'er jing," 1938), a kuaiban piece (rhythmic comic talk to the accompaniment of bamboo clappers), where he praises women warriors:
They are women, but as courageous as men.
Patriots who won't live with a false peace.
Hardworking, they never dress up,
They donate their savings to the nation
And deliver winter clothing to the barracks….
Full of courage, they take up their guns.
They are heroines like Hua Mulan….
Women of a new era, their arms hold up the sky.
And the names of the heroines spread far and wide.[48]
The theme was familiar, but by using the popular kuaiban format, which is particularly effective in creating both drama and tension in a
performance, Lao She clearly sought to heighten audience emotions. Again, the actual performance was of primary concern.
Enthusiasm and versatility notwithstanding, Lao She's works in the domain of popular literature can hardly be rated as artistically superior. Many were mediocre pieces that paled in comparison with his more celebrated prewar novels. But Lao She was a humble man (he called himself a "foot soldier") and a patient learner, and he frankly admitted that, despite his attempts, he remained an amateur in writing popular literature. Still, he never had any doubt about the value of this powerful tool. "If War and Peace only lies on the sofa, whereas drum songs are widely read by soldiers and the people, I certainly [feel] no regret for writing drum songs and not coming out with War and Peace, " Lao She wrote in 1939.[49] China, after all, was living in troubled times, and he was willing to sacrifice artistic refinement for practical needs.
Like his friend Lao She, Lao Xiang avidly promoted popular literature during the war. He was also an accomplished practitioner, producing a prodigious number of works in a short span of time. A graduate of Beijing University's Chinese literature department, Lao Xiang first made his name as a fine essayist noted for his wit and humor. But he was by no means a pure stylist. He often invested his writings with passion and, more important, with a strong dose of social commentary on current rural problems.
Born in a small town in southern Hebei, Lao Xiang considered himself very much a country man with a heritage deeply rooted in the Chinese soil.[50] He firmly believed that the roots of China's problems lay in the countryside, a vast area long ignored or misunderstood by intellectuals. According to Lao Xiang, one of the gravest shortcomings of Chinese education was its indifference toward the peasantry. Consider school textbooks: they were filled with decorated mansions and sumptuously dressed women, representing a life-style far beyond the comprehension of humble peasants. Lao Xiang had long toiled against illiteracy. "Education," he wrote, "must be designed to meet the challenges of real life." He criticized government officials and teachers who were blind to the fact that "the real national resources of China are not coal or iron, but the 300 million reticent peasants."[51]
Not surprisingly, one of Lao Xiang's favorite essay topics was the countryside. His two most popular books, The Yellow Mud (Huangtu ni) and The Countryside (Minjian ji) —both collections of essays that first appeared in such journals as This Human World (Renjian shi)
and The Analects (Lunyu) —chronicled a myriad of rural activities, ranging from "a water pump" to "offering sacrifices to the kitchen god," and were variegated and entertaining. Lao Xiang's prose was always down-to-earth, displaying his profound capacity for realism. No aloof observer, Lao Xiang was a participant as well. His concern for rural problems such as illiteracy, superstition, and hygiene prompted him to devote a large portion of his early career to improving the living conditions of country folk. He spent the early 1930s, for example, in Dingxian as an active member of the Mass Education Movement headed by James Yen, trying to eliminate illiteracy in the countryside. For Lao Xiang, education was more than formal training: it involved changing the minds of the people and exposing problems so that remedies could be found. This concern was the main thrust of his essays during this period. He went to Dingxian to teach, an act described by his friend the writer Sun Fuyuan (1894–1966) as a kind of "homecoming."[52] Indeed, Lao Xiang's knowledge of and love for rural China was rare among other writers of his generation. Another friend, Qu Junong, summed it up best: "In the past, articles about peasants' lives were often the results of intellectuals' dreams, fanciful and unsympathetic. Lao Xiang's pieces, however, are microcosms of rural China. They are real!"[53]
Lao Xiang was in Beijing when that city fell to the Japanese in late July 1937. Life under the occupation was both humiliating and frightening.[54] He managed to flee to the south, later joining the ACRAWA in Hankou. Although there is no direct evidence that Lao Xiang participated directly in the Dingxian mass education group's efforts to collect a large amount of folk literature, notably yangge plays and narrated stories, he spoke enthusiastically about this famous endeavor led by his friend Sun Fuyuan, the director of the "Popular Literature Section" in Dingxian.[55] Lao Xiang's thorough acquaintance with rural life (in Dingxian and elsewhere) and his interest in peasant culture proved to be extremely valuable during the war when he began to refashion a host of traditional popular and folk literature forms into what he called "powerful educational tools."[56] His dream was realized when he took center stage of the popular literature campaign by assuming the editorship of Resisting Till the End in January 1938. The semimonthly, supported and financed by Feng Yuxiang, was one of but a few publications dedicated entirely to the advocacy and dissemination of popular literature during the war. Now Lao Xiang was in a key position to influence the course of that movement, which he did with zeal.
Vowing to "use ink as blood and to turn words into weapons,"[57] Lao Xiang transformed the journal into a major force for popular literature. The journal's appeal lay in its rich array of popular literary forms (ditties, comic dialogues, and drum songs), cartoons (Zhao Wangyun, a friend of Feng Yuxiang's, was a major contributor), patriotic stories, and articles on "pouring new wine into old bottles." For all their variety, the pages displayed a strong nationalist current. Even the title of the journal was an obvious call to arms. Resisting Till the End was a fresh breeze in the publishing world in part because no magazine had ever before placed so much emphasis on popular culture, and in part because of the devotion and energy of its staff (which included Lao She and He Rong—who later replaced Lao Xiang as editor of the journal).
Priced at 8 fen (later increased to 10), Resisting Till the End lasted twenty-six issues, from January 1938 to November 1939. Its impact is difficult to gauge, since circulation data for the journal are scanty, but it seems to have been well received by educated and semiliterate readers. In the eyes of Lao Xiang, the journal played a crucial role in arousing people's nationalistic sentiments by encouraging them to write: "One more word," he noted, "is one extra resistance effort."[58] In his view, this sense of engagement alone was enough to have far-reaching consequences. Besides Resisting Till the End, Lao Xiang helped launch another journal, Resistance Pictorial (Kangzhan huakan), with Lao She and Zhao Wangyun, also financed by Feng Yuxiang.[59]
Perhaps more than any other resistance intellectuals (Lao She included), Lao Xiang experimented with different types of popular culture and excelled in many of them.[60] One area in which he shone was children's song writing. "Collecting Winter Clothing" ("Mu hanyi," 1940) is a good example:
The snow is dancing,
The lone crow is crying.
I am making a fur hat for the soldier.
Where can I find furs?
I ask help from a fox.
The fox runs into the grass.
Oh fox, oh fox, please don't run.
Can you lend me a big fur coat?
I won't wear it,
Nor will he,
We are sending it to the soldier at the front.
It feels so warm,
It looks so good,
We're sure to beat those Japanese.[61]
This piece is in the best tradition of Chinese children's songs. It begins with the familiar description of a natural phenomenon, then the human emotion it arouses. But Lao Xiang was not interested in rhetorical devices. He wished to carry a contemporary message: the importance of supporting the soldiers on the battlefield. Structurally, the song is simple, down-to-earth, and lively, yet its meanings are serious and its mood sanguine. Death is a subtext here, but is treated in an instructional, patriotic manner. The metamorphosis of a dead fox into a fur hat is more than a physical change: it is a transformation of values. Killing revives life, a victory will soon be in sight if the soldiers are well clothed, and many lives will be saved in the end. The image is not of death, but of life and triumph.
Another of Lao Xiang's songs, "A Small Swallow" ("Xiao yanzi," 1939), touches on a different but related theme of war: the bitter experience of a refugee living an uprooted life.
A small swallow,
Atop the roof beam.
Fled from home at seven or eight,
She misses her father,
And misses her mother,
She thinks about her beloved hometown.
What a wonderful place!
A place that's good!
Thinking of home, she hates the Japanese.
Oh, the Japanese devils,
Came to her town,
Killing and burning everything.
She lost her father,
She lost her mother.
She sobs bitterly by the road.
Do not weep,
Do not whine,
If we don't take revenge, we'll be worse than swine.[62]
Again, despite the defeats and suffering that the song describes, it ends on a note of determination and hope.
Besides children's songs, Lao Xiang composed drum songs, comic dialogues, shulaibao, and kuaiban. All were written with a gusto that the reader could not miss. But perhaps his most successful piece was a
revision of the Three-Character Classic (Sanzi jing), a telling case of "pouring new wine into old bottles."
Indeed, Lao Xiang's Anti-Japanese Three-Character Classic (KangRi sanzi jing) was one of the most popular texts penned by a resistance intellectual. But why the traditional Three-Character Classic? To explain his reasons, Lao Xiang recalled two shabby, almost deserted bookstores he had known in Dingxian before the war. Contrary to his expectation that the bookstores were on the verge of closing, their business continued. The secret of their survival, he later learned, was that they were regional wholesale dealers of a number of "outmoded books," including the Three-Character Classic, the Thousand Character Classic (Qianzi wen), and the Hundred Names (Baijia xing) —books that had dominated traditional elementary education in China from Song times on.[63] These texts remained enormously popular among the general public, even in an age of airplanes and telephones. When Lao Xiang later found that few, if any, soldiers or common people understood the contents of resistance magazines like Resisting Till the End, he turned to these "outmoded books" for help.
Lao Xiang published his Anti-Japanese Three-Character Classic in Resisting Till the End in March 1938. As he put it, "Since the Three-Character Classic is such influential reading material among the Chinese people, by pouring 'anti-Japanese new wine' into this old bottle, perhaps the people can accept [this literature] more easily."[64] Yet besides superficial similarities such as title and format (both books used three-character couplets), the two versions were markedly different in content and ideas. Lao Xiang's new version was longer (1,428 words versus about 1,100 in the traditional work, which was available in many versions), and its tone was patriotic rather than didactic. The differences between the two are immediately apparent in their respective opening lines. The traditional Three-Character Classic begins:
Men at their birth are naturally good.
Their natures are much the same; their habits become widely
different.
If foolishly there is no teaching, the nature will deteriorate.
The right way in teaching is toattach the utmost importance to
thoroughness.65
Lao Xiang's version begins:
Men at their birth are naturally loyal and persistent.
Loving their nation is instinctive.
When the nation falls, the family cannot survive.
Protecting the nation is the first concern [for everyone].
66
In the place of the traditional version's call for filial obedience, Lao Xiang emphasized patriotic duty and paid tribute to generals who sacrificed their lives in defense of the nation. And instead of providing historical anecdotes from the Chinese past, the new version chronicled the recent conflict with Japan. Lao Xiang, of course, presented no paragons of morality like Huang Xiang of the Han, who as a young boy warmed his parents' bed in winter before they went to sleep; nor did he exalt the Confucian ideals of benevolence and righteousness. Instead he praised sacrifice and unity, and urged perseverance and contribution to the war cause. Descriptions in the new version were not about past sages and their admirable deeds but about contemporary heroes and Japanese brutality; the emphasis was not on persistent learning but on armed resistance. While the traditional Three-Character Classic ends by advising, "Diligence has its reward; play has no advantages. Oh, be on your guard, and put forth your strength," the new version concludes with a call for revenge and for the recovery of lost territory.
Lao Xiang's piece was an overwhelming success. Not only was it widely reprinted in other magazines, but it sold more than fifty thousand copies in offprints during the first month of issue—a rare achievement at a difficult time in China.[67] Critics hailed it as a virtuoso work that could only have sprung from the author's deep understanding of the resistance movement and his delight in writing it.[68] Part of the reason for its phenomenal success was its low price of 1 jiao (10 fen). The vivid illustrations by Zhao Wangyun, Gao Longsheng, and others also helped. But the main reason was its familiar format—a confirmation of Lao Xiang's own belief that no recipe was more effective in combating the Japanese than the use of traditional forms.
Despite its success, the Anti-Japanese Three-Character Classic, though well organized and written with passion, was by no means a superior artistic achievement. It could not, for example, match the vividness and charm of the same author's children's song "Collecting Winter Clothing." It was longer than its traditional counterpart, its language was more difficult, and its messages utterly familiar, even stale. How ironic that its success was due largely to the perennial influence of an ancient Confucian text that new intellectuals had fought so hard to repudiate since the May Fourth era.
Lao Xiang, of course, was not the first modern writer to use the Three-Character Classic for a purpose other than Confucian education. The Taipings, for instance, realizing the prestige of that earlier work, had used it to render Christianity comprehensible to the masses in the mid-nineteenth century.[69] Christian missionaries in the waning years of the Qing dynasty had also reshaped it into religious tracts.[70] Lao Xiang, then, in writing both this tract and a less successful sequel, the Anti-Japanese Thousand-Character Classic (Kang-Ri qianzi wen),[71] was following a long tradition of literary borrowing.